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To most criticism, Marcuse smilingly answers that his intellectual opponents are simply one-dimensional prisoners of the system. He denies that his ideas are totally negative—although he sees some philosophic merit in "the power of negative thinking"—and that his world view is too pessimistic. Marcuse, though, feels that he has good reason to be gloomy about modern civilization. Born in Ber lin, he was an associate at Frankfurt's Institute for Social Research during the collapse of the Weimar Republic. "Here we had a democratic government," Marcuse says, "yet the Nazis came to power almost through legal means." Despite his Marxist background, he gave up on Russian Communism as a revolutionary failure long before most U.S. leftists did. Marcuse, who worked for the Office of Strategic Services during World War II and later researched and taught at Columbia, Harvard and Brandeis (he is the nation's foremost expert on Hegel), now thinks that U.S. society, once democracy's great hope, is undergoing "an explosion of insanity."
Inevitable Change. Marcuse has now mellowed to the point that in conversation he is willing to concede that the U.S.. may be able to escape from unfreedom without a violent revolution. "I think that fundamental change in this society is possible," he says. "The conflict between this society's great technical instruments and scientific re sources on the one hand and the waste and destructiveness on the other just cannot go on." Change, he feels, will be forced not only by a modern counterpart of Marx's proletariat—"the outcasts and outsiders, the exploited and persecuted of other races, the unemployed and the unemployable"—but also by the young, the sensitive, the educated. "I can't imagine," he says, "an intelligent and sincere man who does not feel that opposition to this society is a necessity—not just in political and philosophical terms, but even in moral and biological terms."